In Which The Clothes Make The Man (Or The Woman)
by chshrkitten
Summary: Erik thinks that you can tell a lot about someone by how they dress: a series of character studies. Modern setting. Largely a gen fic.
1. Christine

Perhaps because of his time spent performing, Erik was always hyper-conscious of how people presented themselves to the world. He firmly believed that you could find out who someone was by analyzing what they choose to display through their clothes.

Christine Daaé, for example. When he'd first met her, the girl dwarfed herself in giant sweaters and loose jeans, and let long hanks of blonde hair fall in front of her face. She kept her head down during her first days at the Populaire, both metaphorically and literally. The only thing she couldn't camouflage was her voice, which rang out across the main stage during auditions with a ferocity that made her blush. That was when Erik had first been drawn to this girl, who sang as though she couldn't stop herself. It had been fascinating, in a tragic way, to see this little slip of a woman who might have evaporated into thin air if music would stop pouring from her lips like a compulsion.

Recently though, she had changed. New color flowed into her cheeks, and her quiet eyes had started to seem less shy, and more thoughtful. She wore her hair away from her face now. Her clothes had changed too. It had started simply enough. Erik remembered how she had arrived at a lesson one day with a large bracelet sparkling on her wrist. He asked about it, and she told him that they'd been cleaning out the vaults, and some of the costume jewelry had been deemed unneeded. She shrugged, blushing. "They said we could keep whatever we wanted from the throwaway pile."

"It suits you." He answered, and she nodded. Something hung in the air between them for a moment, and they quickly moved on to the lesson. At that point they weren't yet used to discussing anything with each other besides music.

It had started with the bracelet, but it hadn't ended there. Gradually, new items of clothing started to appear. A graphic tee shirt displaying angel wings (the irony was not lost), satin headbands, faux-velvet leggings, a pair of combat boots. Erik watched without comment as, over the course of a few months, his student changed. In the way she moved, spoke, acted, and dressed, a new Christine Daaé began to appear. And this Christine Daaé wanted to be noticed. When Erik first met her, she had been so quiet and unwilling to express any opinions, he'd assumed she didn't have much in the way of a personality. He had been wrong. She was a complicated girl.

Her fashion aesthetic was complicated too, not really fitting into any clear genre. The best way to describe it, Erik fancied, was to say that her clothes reflected her: delicate and pretty and a little tough, kind of sad, kind of angry, and more than a little strange. But soft, at the same time. Cream-colored blouses, pink lace, and sparkling jewelry in between the dark eyeliner and black lipstick- even though Christine was still grieving like an open wound, she never felt the need to look like something love couldn't touch.

Erik admired her for that. He was starting to admire her for a lot of things, this strange little angel of his.

AN: I have a LOT of headcanons about modern!Christine and her style. Can you tell? I also have a lot of emotions about clothing symbolism in general, so I might continue this, writing some similar little drabbles focusing on other POTO characters. Let me know if anyone would be interested in that?


	2. Carlotta

With someone as complex and self-contradictory as Carlotta Guidicelli, it's important to look to the small details if one wants to understand her. Erik always liked to think that he understood that better than most. For that matter, he always liked to think that he understood _her_ better than most. It sometimes seemed to him that they might be more alike than either of them would want to admit.

Clothes, for example. Obviously they did not dress alike, but in some ways, Erik thought that he and Guidicelli dressed with the same motivations in mind. Even before the two of them ever really spoke, he watched her. Why not? She interested him, and nothing about her was more interesting than the way she dressed. She draped herself in fabrics that spoke of life lived well beyond her means (theater paid well, but hardly reliably), and dripped jewels off her throat, her arms, her wine-colored nails. It was ostentatious, and absurd, and mesmerizing, and she knew it. Oh God, how she knew it. The more he observed her, the more clearly he saw: every gesture, every gem, every inch of bared cleavage or flowing hair, every detail of this somehow abrasively gorgeous woman, was for the sake of an effect.

Not that that made him think less of her- as though she would care what he thought! She didn't know him, didn't even know that he existed. Erik tried very hard to remember that.

Most of the time, he didn't really mind. He knew perfectly well that if they ever met, she would loathe him on sight, and that he would probably grow to hate her too in time. They were too much alike to ever have any sort of relationship. He just liked watching her. He did not love her, but there was something entrancing about the way she made fear into armor. So many times, at galas and parties, he had seen her flinch at a stranger's unasked for touch, and then lean even further into them as though she had something to prove. She seemed to do everything as though she had something to prove.

That woman dressed like she was daring people to look at her, and simultaneously daring them to look away.

Erik could understand that.


	3. Meg

AN: In an effort to lose my writer's block (which is why this hasn't updated for over a month, sorry about that), I thought I'd try something new. So, this chapter is a post-LND story. I promise the other chapters are not and will not be. But I kind of like how this turned out.

Also, warning: this chapter contains a brief mention of suicidal ideation, and a more indirect mention of (shocker) forced prostitution.

The most obnoxious thing about Meg Giry had always been her clothes.

And that's saying something, since there were so many things about her that Erik found obnoxious. Her open face, her grasping hands, the way her eyes followed him when he swept from the room.

He knew that she thought herself in love with him. He also knew that little Meg was ten years younger than him, had few friends of her own, and had never once had a full conversation with him that wasn't about work.

Erik worried about her sometimes, but mostly he was annoyed. He hadn't asked her, or Antoinette for that matter, to uproot their lives to come with him. The Giry family certainly had done enough for him in the past, they didn't owe him anything. Erik wished he could say _he_ wasn't beholden.

He could see, of course, the way Antoinette had expected him to repay them, even if she wouldn't think of it as repayment, just life running its natural course. But he had never once been compelled to look twice at her daughter, even without considering Christine.

Still, Erik maintained that little Meg's clothes were frequently more claustrophobic than her dangling expectations. The girl had always had a habit of leaving them _everywhere,_ toe shoes hanging from stair posts or her jacket strewn across the sofa in the front room of the building.

Most of all though, she had liked to leave things in Erik's office. Not a single time had he called her in to talk business without afterwards finding some little bit of cloth left with seeming carelessness on his desk or the floor. Once he had even found one of her costume dresses, a tiny scrap of purple material dripping with sequins, draped over the back of his chair. He really had no idea how she had even gotten it into his office, let alone left it there without his noticing. It was probably smuggled in ahead of time in her purse, one more unsubtle way of marking her territory.

Not that he was her territory, or anyone's. Not that he ever _tried_ to raise the girl's hopes. But she had remained fixated on him, and her clothing had continued to linger just like her dark brown eyes.

In hindsight, perhaps he should have been more worried about her. Perhaps he should have taken more notice of the odd hours she kept and the shadows under her dead eyes, or at least the way she always brought in more money (tips on her performances, she had said) than any of the other girls. It wasn't as though Erik didn't know the signs. He really should have seen it in time. If he had, maybe it could have all been headed off- the pier, the gunshot, the hospital Meg would now probably never leave.

He tried not to think too much about the hospital, or especially about the gunshot and the life it had ended. If he let himself dwell on that, Erik figured he would probably kill himself. Which would have been fine, except he had a son to take care of. Lord knows de Chagny wasn't up to providing any sort of help with that.

By and large, Erik's strategy of not acknowledging the tragedy worked, up until the day he had to clean out his office. They were leaving New York, he and Gustave. There was nothing left for them in America, and selling Phantasma hadn't exactly been difficult. They would go to Spain, or Germany, or Sweden- well, no. Certainly not _Sweden._ But they would go somewhere. Erik knew he would probably never be the best parent, but at least his son would not grow up alone.

Until now, Erik had managed to forget about the other lonely child who had been in his life. And then he found something, while packing up his office. It was such a little thing, just an old white hair ribbon that had been tucked into his pen holder. But Erik knew who it must have belonged to. Meg had been fond of those silly degas-girl hair ribbons, even though they made her look even younger than she actually was. She must have left this one here a long time ago.

That stupid, crazy, _victim_ of a girl.

White satin crumpled in Erik's fist, and his other hand gripped the edge of the desk so tightly that his knuckles blanched beneath his gloves, as he finally let the wave of emotion crash over him. When his mind had cleared somewhat, he found himself staring down at his own knuckles as though in a reverie.

He took the time to smooth out the wrinkles and fold the ribbon carefully before throwing it away.


End file.
